ROAR, DOAR and Route 66 (kind of)

Note: Slides available from here.

I attended the RSP Repository Services Day in Nottingham this week. Held at the city’s university, the event was to “showcase key repository and search services,” with several presentations on offer. One of the interesting points came during Peter Millington’s presentation on OpenDOAR with his mention of Repository 66. A mash-up of Google Maps, and ROAR and OpenDOAR data, the site shows a global view of repositories, with the possibility to display each marker according to the number of items within each repository. I found this interesting – a take on a tag cloud displaying more popular tags in increasing font size – as it enhanced a simple snapshot of repository population.

It got me thinking: we could see more of this sort of example in other representations, e.g., when displaying a list of previous SIG meetings, perhaps they could be sized according to the number of references in blog posts? Or could blog post headlines be sized according to the number of linkbacks or comments?

Unfortunately, flight times meant I missed the day’s afternoon discussion: feel free to leave a comment about it if you were there. Of course, I should have known my flight home would be delayed, although at least we were spared the usual “technical problem”: there are not many ways to disguise a hole in the runway!